Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
It only takes a few seconds of Saint Maud – dripping blood, a dead body contorted on a gurney, a young woman’s deranged face staring at an insect on the ceiling, an industrial clamour more likely to score the gates of hell than the pearly ones – to make us realise that the film’s title is a tad ironic. That irony will become even sharper, and mordantly witty, when we find that for the eponymous hospital nurse turned private carer (references no doubt fudged for the private sector), sainthood would be most welcome. “What’s the plan?” she asks of God, with whom she Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
At 93-years-old and with a career that spans nearly 60 years, David Attenborough has spent a lifetime transporting audiences from the comfort of their sofas to the dazzling, often bewildering, majesty of the natural world. Now, he offers what he calls his ‘witness statement’, a Netflix documentary that not only charts Attenborough’s remarkable career, but also how the world has changed for the worse over those years. Biodiversity is dwindling, and with it goes humanity’s future prospects. Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey for Netflix, we go from seeing Read more ...
Graham Fuller
On the Rocks has an unusual premise. Laura (Rashida Jones), a New York City novelist and mother of two young daughters, suspects her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) is having an affair with a co-worker, Fiona (Jessica Henwick). Laura confides her fears to Felix (Bill Murray) and they’re soon zipping around Manhattan at night pursuing Dean and Fiona in Felix’s dyspeptic Alfa Romeo. But Felix isn’t a seedy detective who does divorce work like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown – he’s a well-off, semi-retired art dealer and, what’s more, he’s Laura’s feckless father. The seventh feature written and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard, somewhere deep into the 865 pages of Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee's capacious (to put it mildly) biography of the British theatre's leading wordsmith. As a literary artefact, Lee's exhaustive chronicle is a lot of words, and it's tempting to see her achievement as the non-fiction equivalent of, say, The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard's grandly conceived, three-part epic about political and intellectual life in 19th-century Russia.The difference here is that Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
You could imagine that normality had returned watching the live webcasts from the Wigmore Hall. The Hall has bucked the trend, and managed to present a full autumn season, to a carefully separated but still substantial audience. Yesterday evening’s concert was to be given by Quatuor Ébène, but they pulled out at the last minute—problems with travelling from France perhaps the reason. But the Wigmore Hall had another ensemble, the Elias Quartet, lined up and ready to give a similar programme. Given the unpredictable situation, the management has presumably organised last-minute stand-ins for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How loud can the applause from a scanty, socially-distanced audience sound? Thunderous enough, as the response to Sir András Schiff’s back-to-back recitals at the Wigmore Hall proved. On both Sunday and Monday evenings, the happy few of 112 – the venue’s Covid-era maximum – did their depleted best to raise the roof in answer to Schiff’s unstintingly, and typically, lavish commitment. He gave us 100 uninterrupted minutes of Janáček and Schumann on the first night, capped the next day by the epic trio of Beethoven’s final piano sonatas, op.109, 110 and 111 (with some Bach thrown in for good Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” reads the neon sign (pictured below right) welcoming you to Bruce Nauman’s Tate Modern retrospective. The message is tongue-in-cheek, of course. How on earth could an artist cope with such a ludicrously unrealistic expectation? Born in 1941, the American artist has had a huge influence on recent British art. In the late 1960s, he filmed himself messing about in the studio – performing silly walks or repeatedly bashing his back against the wall – thereby ridiculing the need to have something significant to say. He made it all Read more ...
David Nice
A muse of fire descended on the top floor of a former warehouse in the East End, unextinguished by the rain which fell almost continuously outside during the four stupendous concerts – three advertised, one a generous bonus – of the Ragged Music Festival. Once turned into an educational refuge for the East End poor by the heroic Dr Barnardo, surviving the Blitz unlike just about every other building in the vicinity, this unlikely and allegedly haunted venue – the Paranormal Society is due to have a sleepover here soon – the Ragged School Museum has been commandeered by pianists and partners, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert by Sir Bryn Terfel and the Britten Sinfonia, the very first concert given at the Barbican in front of an audience since 15 March, was surely in need of some stronger explanation than that offered by the blurb for the evening, namely “comfort and familiarity” and a “remedial tonic of an evening.”There was, and more than one. First there was a biographical story: as the Welsh singer explained, the first and second elements of the three-part programme had both a personal and a local significance for him. The second work, Gerald Finzi’s cycle of Shakespeare songs Let us Garlands Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It takes nerve to throw a shadow across the face of your heroine, still more to banish to the margins the severed head that might so easily dominate the painting’s centre ground. Instead, in imagining the aftermath of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi wrings out the excruciating tension of a moment, and concentrates it in a candle flame. What in reproduction looks like a minor detail is revealed “on the wall” as the visual and emotional fulcrum of this monumental painting, in which we see Artemisia, by now a mature painter, much in demand, brimming with painterly bravado Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Classical music TV documentaries don’t often merit comparison to buses. So it was singularly bad luck that Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History hit the TV screens the day after a very different film, John Bridcut's profile of Bernard Haitink which virtually sanctified an already great and venerable conductor and sparked heights of ecstasy amid innumerable lovers of 19th-century standard concert repertoire. In the aftermath, The Forgotten History was nearly forgotten all over again.It offered a fount of tumultuous stories, ranging across three centuries of classical composers Read more ...
Charlie Stone
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and film-makers, drawn from real life or entirely fictional, are regular patrons of his stories. Boyd’s latest novel, Trio, is no different. Taking place on a film set in Brighton during the summer of 1968, Trio follows the lives of its three protagonists as they encounter the usual – and unusual – challenges of life in showbusiness. Artistic creation is the watchword both for the setting and its inhabitants. Talbot, the film’s producer, Anny, its star, and Elfrida, a struggling Read more ...